August Journal, Part One

   Woke up, fell out of bed,
   Dragged a comb across my head...            The Beatles

Friday 2nd. Live Tournament
   I went to the Texas Holdem Tourney at the Workingmen's Club, as per usual. Started out well when I hit a full house early on, but after that my hands were just not connecting. Every time I got an ace, it got beat. By the middle stage my stack was almost to the all-in-or-fold level. Then I hit the nut flush a couple of times and chipped up. They started the tournament with 30 minute blind levels, then they dropped down to 20 minutes. My wife was knocked out in 8th place. By the time we reached the bubble (5 players paid) I had less than 10 big blinds left. Managed to limp into the money. Then with 5 players left I had a couple of good collects (one of them another flush). I became the big stack bully and cruised into the top two. It was nearly midnight by this stage so we split the prize pool and I went home with $182. Nice.

Monday 5th. Online SNG session.
   I had a day off work so decided to play a few $5.50 SitNGos on 888poker.
1. Bad decision. Early in the game I call an all-in river bet with 2 pair and get beaten by a flopped straight. Left with just 1 1/2 big blinds. I go all-in and hit a straight on the turn with four other players in the pot. Then there is a straight on the board on the river and the pot is split five ways! I get knocked out a couple of hands later, 8th out of 9.
2. Arm wrestle.  One of those games where everyone hangs on and the blinds get big with 5 or 6 short-stacked players still in the game. I get off to a bad start, down to all-in-or fold mode. Then I double up and hang around among the shorter stacks, just trying to stay out of trouble. With the BB at 500 (they start at 20) and 5 players still in, three players go all-in and I make the money. But with only 3 BB left, the best I can manage is 3rd.
3. Running good. I double up after getting top pair and calling big bets all the way to the river, where I hit a straight. Turns out the opposition was betting on a flush draw that never came in. I'm to the right of an aggressive player who raises a lot when he's the big stack, then starts going all-in a lot when his stack gets downsized. Eventually I call his pre-flop all-in with AQ and beat his A7. I cruise into the money as the big stack then have a long heads-up battle before finally taking out first prize.
4. Oops. I pick up AK in the first hand and raise to 4x the BB. One player re-raises and there are 3 callers (!) so I 4-bet it and he calls. The flop is something like 3 6 9. The opposition puts in a big bet and, foolishly, I re-raise all-in. He calls with QQ and I leave the game with egg on my face.
5. Roller coaster. I start out well but then lose a lot of chips trying to bluff a persistent player with middle pair. By mid-game I'm down to 5 BBs but chip up with some successful all-ins. I cross the bubble in 3rd position but a series of poor hands and poor decisions result in a 3rd place finish.
   My first winning session for this game type for quite a while. Hoping to keep up the momentum.

Wednesday 7th. Online 7 Card Stud.
   My regular Wednesday poker night. I go into this low level 7 Card Stud session on Pokerstars with the aim of playing tight. I want to see 4th St (the equivalent of seeing the flop in Holdem) less than 40% of the time. I also aim to chase draws only when I have the right pot odds and always be aware of the number of 'lost outs' - cards that could help me but are showing in someone else's hand. After a while I find that betting when I'm showing a big card and everyone else is checking is usually profitable. I get off to a good start and stay ahead for quite a while. 2 1/2 hours in and my percentage for seeing 4th St goes above 40. Three hours in and my stack drops below my original buy-in. After 4 hours I finish slightly behind. I seldom come out ahead at this game.
Hands where I saw 4th St: 43%
Pots won at showdown: 50%
25 pots won without showdown.

Friday 9th. Live Tournament.
   Back to the 'Workies' again. My wife and I turn up and find that there are 32 players this week, a new record. This game is one of a series of ten and players who make the final table (top 10) each week get points for their finishing position. The overall points winner after ten weeks gets a cash prize. I discover that I am currently in first place on the points table. Nice.
   As for the game, I get nowhere fast. My best pre-flop hands all night are A9 and 99. I pick up the A9 in my first hand and raise. I get re-raised and fold. My opponent then shows he had AQ. It's always a bonus when you get free information. The 99 did much better. I ended up flopping a set of 9s vs a set of 3s. Collected a nice pot. But didn't get much more after that and ended up all-in with pocket 7s vs AK. Knocked out 18/32.
   My wife also got knocked out about the same time, but still managed to win some money. There is a jackpot each game for any player who gets quads (four of a kind) or a straight flush. You pay an extra $2 each week to be in this jackpot. My wife pays into this and she hit quad Aces. So we had to stay around to the end of the game to collect her money. There were quite a few 'rail birds' watching the game at the end. It's getting quite popular.

Wednesday 14th. Online SNG session.
   Normally I try to fit in a SNG poker session on the weekend, but it's not always easy to manage. As Fridays are now booked, I've decided to play alternate sessions of SNGs and 7 Stud online, regardless of the day.  So my Wednesday poker night this time is a SNG session on 888poker.
1. Very sticky players in this game - they just won't let go. I double up early with a set vs top pair. Then I lose a lot betting QQ hard when a chaser hits a straight on the river. 7/9
2. Early on I get AKs and end up 3 betting it. With an Ace and Queen on the flop I bet big and he calls. A Ten on the turn gives him a set and I end up all-in on the river with a losing hand. 9/9
3. This time it's my flopped top pair vs top set on the flop. I keep calling his bets and am all-in on the river. 8/9
4. I last longer in this one. I end up in a five-way arm wrestle. With fewer than 10 BB I try to trap my opponent when I flop 2 pair. But he turns a flush. Trapped myself. 5/9
5. Should have quit by this stage but decide to play just one more... I pick up chips here and there but am short-stacked towards the end, then get lucky with a couple of all-ins. Make the final three as the short stack, but manage to play my way into first position. Yay! 1/9
6. OK, one more... Lose a lot of chips by playing mid-strength hands from poor position (when will I learn?). With a short stack I limp in with a weak King. I go all-in when I hit top pair and am beaten by both callers; a flopped 2 pair (8 4) and a turned straight (A K). 8/9
   Another losing SNG session.

Friday 16th. Live Tournament.
   Another big turnout at the Workies: 31 players this time. They vary the starting stacks and blinds each week. This time we start quite deep with 150 BB. My first table has some VERY loose players who will call almost any pre-flop raise. I get a number of good starting hands, raise 3x the blind, and get called by virtually the whole table. For example: I raise with AQ, hit an Ace on the flop, and my big bets are called to the river by a player with J2s ! Of course he hits a flush on the river. Later, I knock him out when I get sick of my raises being called and limp in with JJ, only to hit a set on the flop. He calls my river all-in with middle pair. Haha. I do OK for a while but eventually get worn down and finish 13th.
   I'm trying to figure out the best way to play against such sticky players. Should I push my pre-flop raises higher to try and isolate one or two callers, even if it means committing a significant number of precious chips to just one hand? Or should I just limp in and hope my hand improves enough to beat all the other callers and take out a huge pot?  I have to decide how I'm going to approach this style of game in future. Now I've really got Friday on my mind.

Attitude Adjustment

Life is what happens to you
while you're busy making other plans.            John Lennon

www.kiwiology.co.nz
   A few months ago I decided to take a month's break from poker. This was in the middle of a prolonged downswing. My results changed from very good to very bad from April this year, and looked set to continue downhill indefinitely. Something similar happened about the same time last year and my winning margin had turned into a losing margin by the end of the year. In an effort to prevent this from happening again, I called a time out. I had become increasingly frustrated with my sudden change of fortune and figured that taking a break would do me good.
   Although I spent the time reading up on poker strategy and thinking about how to improve my game, I didn't actually play any poker during that period. It was actually surprising to me how easy it was to go a month without poker games. Although I missed playing, I managed to find plenty of things to fill my time; things I used to do before my poker obsession started. By the time that I returned to the game I was feeling refreshed and ready to play.
   But my plan to break my losing streak didn't work. I continued to lose in my online poker games in a fairly consistent manner. In fact, in July I had a run of 15 online SitnGo games without cashing even once. The Seven Card Stud games were just as bad, with a steady run of bad results, albeit at very low buy-in levels. But this time around, the string of losses didn't bother me. Each time I lost I just brushed it off and carried on. No worries. At first I figured that this new-found attitude would wear off in time, but it didn't. It appears to be a permanent attitude adjustment. Although my live poker tournament results were a bit better, the new attitude was also evident when things didn't work out. In my second live game, when I was in the top seven players and went all-in with pocket aces, only to be knocked out by someone who called me with Q2 offsuit, I just shook his hand and walked off with a smile. No worries.

   I've been trying to put my finger on what it is that's had such a drastic effect on my way of approaching the game. The more I think about it, the more I come to the realisation that it's about expectations. I think that one of the things that got me so annoyed about my poor form earlier was the contrast with the previous period of very good results. Since the beginning of the year my bankroll had been increasing slowly but steadily and I'd come to the conclusion that I'd finally figured out how to play SitnGos successfully. Going on a losing run even though I hadn't changed my strategy was a bit of a shock to the system. But coming back into the game, although I hoped to start winning again, I wasn't expecting to.
   On reflection, this all goes back to the time when I first started taking the game seriously. When I first started reading about poker it was something of a revelation that there were actually people who could make a living out of playing poker. I think it was always in the back of my mind that if I got good enough, I could be one of those people. As a result, I became very results driven. Even a casual look at my previous posts shows a pre-occupation with my results and the size of my bankroll. So whenever I posted a few losses it was a big problem and the more I tried to analyse my way out of the hole the worse my play got. It wasn't about the game anymore, but about the results.
   Having a break from poker has given me a new sense of perspective. I'm now much more relaxed about the games. I'm no longer obsessing about whether my bankroll is increasing and drawing graphs of my progress. That doesn't mean that I don't care about winning, just that I care less about losing. Most importantly, I'm enjoying playing like I used to and am focused on the game itself rather than the results. Of course I still try to improve my game and play as well as I possibly can. Playing poker is such a terrific challenge and there is always something new to learn. So that's what I concentrate on: learning to play the game as well as I possibly can and letting the results take care of themselves.

Going Live

      Today I might be mad,
      Tomorrow I'll be glad,
      I've got Friday on my mind.      The Easybeats

   As mentioned in my previous post, I've discovered a weekly live Texas Holdem tournament. This tourney is on a Friday night, and costs $20 to enter. My wife and I found out about this in late June and we've played five weeks in a row since then, although we're probably going to give it a miss this week as we have a pool competition on Saturday that starts quite early. If you make the money in this tourney (usually the top five) you're probably going to get home close to midnight. Typically there are 20 to 25 players involved, which means a total prize pool of around $500. So far I've finished 18th, 7th, 3rd, 6th and 5th, leaving me $20 down overall. I'm reasonably happy with this result although I think I need to work on my endgame a bit to get a better payout when I make the money.
   I'm impressed with the professional way in which this tourney is run. Firstly, it invariably starts on time, at 7pm. When I used to play in a tournament at a pub a couple of years ago, their 7pm start time usually became 8pm or later. The current tourney organisers also use tournament management software, displaying all the relative information on a big screen for everyone to see. It's good to be able to look up and see when the next break is, when the blinds go up next and by how much, how many players are left in, what the average stack size is and so on. Also, they usually manage to find someone to do the dealing once the numbers get down to the last three or four. I discovered last week that ten percent comes out of the prize pool for a charitable donation. This is a requirement under New Zealand's gaming laws, and is not much different from the standard ten percent game fee of most online tournaments. So overall, a very good event to be involved with.
  After playing online for so long, I didn't realise how much I missed playing live poker until I started up with this game. There's just nothing like sitting around a table with real live people, peeking at your hole cards and stacking up your chips. Although it's taken me awhile to get used to the duties of live play. You have to remember to post the blinds, not to act out of turn, to announce your raise, not make string bets and to refrain from commenting on the cards while the they are still in play, among other things. Unlike playing on a computer, you've got to do it all yourself.
   The people who play in this tournament are a pretty good bunch, all very friendly and have welcomed us into their game without reservation (even though my wife and I are not even members of their club - yet). Many of them have been playing for a while and know each others' play quite well. But I haven't come across anyone with a particularly intimidating playing style. Play is generally pretty loose and passive, especially in the early stages. For most of the players, it's all about the draw. Of course, being a club, there is a fair bit of drinking going on by some of the players, myself included. It's not beyond the realms of possibility that my lack of top two finishes has something to do with the cumulative effects of alcohol consumption, so I guess I'd better cut back a bit.
   Apart from this weekly tourney, we got involved in a monthly Texas Holdem tournament that involves a number of different clubs. This is a teams competition that is played once a month on a Sunday. Each club puts up an eight player team and they all play in a $20 entry tourney. Each person plays individually, in the usual way, but they also get points for their team, based on the position they finish in. Apparently some of the prize money goes into a separate pool that is paid out to the highest-scoring teams at the end of the year. As individual, non-team players can also participate, my wife and I both entered and played in this game. Oddly enough, it was held at our home club. It turns out that the poker players from our home club had been entering teams in this competition for some time, but this was the first time we'd ever heard about it. Anyway, my wife and I both went deeper into this tourney than any of our RSA team players managed, and I ended up making the top three out of a total of 59 players. We three split the prize pool and I walked away with $200. Nice.
   Despite this success, I'm not sure if I'll play in this monthly game again. A big chunk of the prize pool goes into the end-of-year pool, which amounts to a pretty big rake unless you are in a team and play in every tourney. Even then, any end-of-year payout would depend on how well your team-mates did. I just don't see poker as a team sport.
   But I will definitely be turning up at the Workingman's Club most Friday nights for the weekly poker tourney. My immediate goal is to take out first place and get a decent payout. But regardless of the results, even if I come up with a string of poor results, I think my Friday nights are booked for quite a while.

News Briefs

        What's the buzz?
        Tell me what's a-happening.           Jesus Christ Superstar

    Having taken a one month break from poker play in an effort to break my most recent losing streak, I am now back in the game. Although I haven't been playing poker, I've still been keeping in touch with the poker world in various ways:

SECRETS OF SITNGOS. I went down to the local library and got myself a poker book to study: Secrets of Sitngos. This was the only book I could find that dealt specifically with SitnGo tournaments, and I found it to be moderately useful. As usual it was aimed mainly at higher-level players but there were a few ideas that I found to be of interest. I particularly liked the end section, where particular scenarios were put forward and the reader was given the opportunity to answer a multiple choice question on what to do next. However much of the book was based on a theory called the Independent Chip Model or ICM, a mathematical model based on the assumed real-money value of tournament chips in different situations. This mathematical stuff went pretty much completely over my head and frankly, if being a good player in SitnGos is dependant on applying complex mathematical hand analysis, I guess I'll just have to keep swimming with the other fish.

POKER ON TV. I'm still watching Poker after Dark and The Big Game each week. In fact my wife and I have got into the habit of watching these shows over breakfast on Saturday and
Sunday mornings. The new 'loose cannon' (the amateur player) on The Big Game is doing pretty well, especially after doubling up through Phil Hellmuth. He's so far ahead of the other contenders now that he's basically shut up shop. He even folded pocket aces at one stage in order to preserve his big stack. Meanwhile I've found yet another poker show playing on Thursdays. This one covers the Aussie Millions tournament and one of the commentators is Aussie poker pro Joe Hachem. His comments about the play and what he thinks the players are going to do, or what they should do, are always interesting and insightful.

POKER SCHOOL. I also checked out the Poker Stars Poker School which looks to be a useful tool for learning about correct poker play. However I only read the first few sections, as I wanted to concentrate on the SitnGo book. I will get back to it sometime soon, but for now I'm concentrating on actually playing.

WSOP. The World Series of Poker is now in full swing and I've been checking out some of the results on www.wsop.com .  It's nice to be able to go to the website and see who's winning or losing in different events. They're even streaming some of the final tables live, with commentary. Last year they showed the Main Event live (delayed by about 10 minutes actually) on ESPN. I don't know if they're doing that again this year, but I think Day One starts tomorrow, so I'll be keeping an eye out. Actually, I may be approaching saturation point for Poker TV programmes.

LIVE TOURNEY. After searching high and low I've finally found a decent live poker tournament. It turns out that the Workingman's Club just up the road from the RSA where I usually hang out has been running a Texas Holdem Tournament every Friday night for the last three years. This tourney is $20 entry, no rebuys, no add-ons, no extra chips; just what I've been looking for. The entry fee is technically beyond my buy-in limit but I'm willing to bend my buy-in rules for the sake of being able to play in a live tourney. My wife and I have played for the last three weeks and intend to continue going up there pretty much every week. The first week I was eliminated 16 out of 18, week two I came in 7th and this week I made 3rd out of 26 and made my three buy-ins back.

NEW CONCEPTS. The book I previously mentioned introduced me to three new poker concepts.
   The ICM. The Independent Chip Model basically tells you how to act based on your chip stack and that of your opponents and a number of other factors. Apparently you can get software that does the calculations for you. I'm not really interested in going down this road. I had enough maths in school.
   Sharkscope. This is a website that gathers information on online players. You go to www.sharkscope.com , type in a player's username, and get a lot of information on their results from the tournaments they've played online. This could be potentially quite useful. I went to the site and discovered that 888 poker doesn't allow this sort of data mining so there is no info available for 888 players.  So I tried typing in my own username for Pokerstars, as I've played a couple of SitnGos on that site. The info that came up said that I'd played 1 SitnGo and 1 Omaha Pot-limit Tournament. I've never played an Omaha tournament in my life, so I guess the information available on this site is not entirely accurate.
    ROI. I've seen players refer to 'return on investment' before, as a measure of success in games, but never paid much attention to it. But having it explained in the SitnGo book has made me realise that it is a much better way of measuring poker success than my current method. It's very simple. ROI is just a measure of the amount won (or lost) as a percentage of the amount 'invested'. This provides a useful measure of results regardless of the buy-in level. I will definitely be re-assessing my record-keeping to accommodate this new concept.

NEW ATTITUDE. The online games I've played so far since my break have yielded very poor results. It seems that my losing streak is still alive and well, as far as online games go anyway. But the difference is that it's not bugging me anymore (at least not so far). I've come back into the game with a whole new attitude. Maybe I was getting so worked up over losing before because it was in contrast to my previous good results. Now, even though I'm losing consistently, and have actually dropped down a couple of levels in my SitnGos, I accept my losses with good humour and just keep trying. I seem to have gained a sense of perspective on my poker play that I didn't have before and I think that I will be re-assessing my whole approach to the game. But more on that later...
  

Skycity

  You always said
  The cards would never do you wrong
  The trick you said
  Was never play the game too long          Bob Seager

    Auckland got its first (and only) casino in 1996. Not long after it opened my wife and I went and checked it out, just to see what it was like. I guess we must have enjoyed it because we've been going there maybe two or three times a year ever since. Back then there were no poker tables at the casino. Some of the gaming machines were poker machines, where you get dealt a poker hand and try to draw a prize-winning one. There was also a table game called Caribbean Stud Poker, where patrons play against the house like they do in Blackjack. But there were no live poker games available, not that I was looking for that at the time. Generally my wife would play on 'the pokies' and I would play Roulette, or occasionally try my hand at Tai Sai or the 'Winning Wheel'.
   They installed poker tables on the mezzanine floor sometime in the early Twentyfirst Century and I finally got around to trying it out in 2008. The poker primers that I'd been reading inspired me to go and try my hand (so to speak) at casino poker games. So, after a couple of stiff drinks at the bar I went and bought in for $100 and joined the $1/$2 cash game. After getting over my initial nervousness, I found it quite enjoyable. Although it was my first ever casino game I probably wouldn't remember much about it if it wasn't for a particular incident.
   I'd been playing for a while when I picked up a small pocket pair. Two other players saw the flop, which was A A X. There was a bet and a call from the other two, and I called as well. There was more betting on the turn and the river, and for some reason I kept calling. I don't know why I thought my two pair was good in the face of two players' aggressive raises but I did, and both my opponents turned over aces. This was an embarrassingly bad play but it was made much worse by what happened afterwards.
   One of the players who'd turned over trips was astonished by my stupid call. He proceeded to address the table at length about how he couldn't understand why I'd do that. He spent some time carefully dissecting the hand while I sat there and tried to shrink into the back of my seat. He never actually addressed me and he never actually called me an idiot, but he might as well have. I was well aware of how bad the play had been, but he was just making sure that everyone else knew. Not long after that I picked up AJ suited and raised. Mr Analysis then re-raised all-in. I thought for a bit , then called him. I think it's fair to say that a good part of my decision to call was a desire to get even. He turned over pocket sevens, and by the time we reached the river I had nothing and he had a full house. That was the end of my first casino game. Not a great start.
   I went back up and played three more times over that summer holiday period, with mixed results. It was a while ago now but I do remember flopping an Ace high straight at one stage, and also seeing my pocket Queens become trips on the flop and then quads on the river. I also recall one game where one of the players was a big-stack maniac, raising nearly every hand and annoying the hell out of everyone else. At this time the poker area was very busy, with a number of different levels of cash game being played and regular low buy-in SitnGo tournaments. They were even playing Omaha cash games for a while there.
   I came back to play some more casino games towards the end of 2009. Skycity was running a prize draw promotion on Wednesday nights and my wife was keen to try and win the big prize. So we went up to the casino on a number of Wednesday evenings over the holidays and I took the opportunity to play a little poker. By this stage the blinds in the lowest level cash game were $2/$3, so a $100 buy-in only amounted to 33 big blinds, rather than 50.

   The great thing about casino games is that you get all the fun of a live game without the hassle of having to deal. The dealer does everything for you, even keeping you informed of whose turn it is to act. All you have to do is concentrate on your game. What's more, there are a lot of gamblers around, which is generally a good thing for someone who knows a little about correct play. Of course the down-side is the rake. From my reading I understand that Skycity's ten percent rake is on the high side, and makes it difficult for anyone to win in the long run.
   By the end of 2010 I was playing in regular tournaments at a local pub, so I gave the casino a miss. However, I did go up there in January 2011 to check out the Monday night tournament that some other players had told me about. First I went up to the casino on the weekend to get all the details, and confirmed that it was $20 buy-in and $20 re-buy. So I turned up on Monday night and bought my tourney chips along with maybe 50 or 60 others. I was somewhat surprised when I sat down at the table to find that nearly everyone else had a bigger stack than me. That's when I learned that players could buy in for double the starting stack for an extra $10; something that the cashier I'd spoken to on the previous day had neglected to mention. Much to my disgust, I started the game at a disadvantage and eventually got knocked out after going all-in with KQ. Then when I tried to re-buy I found that I had to use casino chips rather than cash; something else I didn't know. Luckily for me one of the other players helped me out and sold me some of his casino chips which enabled me to re-buy. The tournament hadn't been going for an hour when I ended up all-in pre-flop with KQ again, and lost again.  It turns out that there was also a variable re-buy and a two-level add-on available in this game. If I were to buy-in, re-buy and add-on for the maximum amount it would have cost about $100. Very far from the $20/$20 cost that I been told about! That was my one and only Skycity poker tournament.
   It was not long after this that I started playing online. I was now in a position to play poker at any buy-in level I chose, which allowed me to start a proper bankroll management plan. No more expensive buy-ins for me. So on the odd occasion when my wife and I went to the casino, I stuck to the roulette. Except for one occasion last year when I decided to have a 'just-for-fun' game; one that I would play with my gambling money, not my poker bankroll. By this stage the 'poker zone' had been moved to a new location; a much smaller room on the other side of the mezzanine, tucked away out of sight. I guess the poker boom was over. The blinds had also been increased to $2/$4. Even though I bought in for only 20 big blinds I did very well in this game, coming out after a couple of hours with nearly $600. That was my best result ever in any poker game in terms of actual payout.
   Despite this success I haven't been back to the 'poker zone' and don't intend to do so any time soon. Since then it's been moved again: it's now in an even smaller area with only a handful of tables in a sort of sports bar arrangement. If I ever play poker at Skycity it will be when I have a large enough bankroll to support the buy-in, which is still a very long way off indeed. At the moment the cheapest available game is a $60 weekly tournament, which is way beyond a comfortable buy-in for me. Even so, I consider it to be a medium to long term goal to one day play poker at Skycity again. Meanwhile, I'll be rubbing shoulders with the other gamblers at the roulette tables.
  
  

Time Out

   You got to lose,
   You can't win all the time,
   Well I know pretty baby,
   I see trouble coming down the line.        George Thorougood and the Destroyers

   Well it's Wednesday night, but unlike many many previous  Wednesdays, I'm not playing poker. After celebrating playing over a thousand hours of poker in my last post, I am now taking a break from all poker play. It's amazing how quickly things can change over the course of a few weeks.
   I mentioned in my last post that my bankroll hit an all-time high in mid-April, but since then things have taken a turn for the worse. The 'flat patch' that I was in has turned into a sudden steep downturn. Since the beginning of May I've cashed very seldom in SitnGos (3 thirds and 1 first in the last twenty games) and as a result I've had the first losing month since November of last year. As Texas Holdem SitnGos are my strongest game, this is a bit of a worry. I can't help thinking back to this time last year when my results started to decline and continued on a downward spiral through to November ('Midwinter Nosedive', 23 July 2012). I don't want that to happen again.

   But the problem is not so much the string of losses as the nature of those losses. As far as I can tell, I haven't altered my basic game-plan, but I just keep getting beaten. I seem to have been suffering an incredible run of bad cards and when I do get good cards I hit nothing, or some-one else has something better, or some fool calls with rags and draws out on me on the river. Now this sort of thing happens all the time in poker, but it seems to have been happening to me non-stop over the last few weeks. All this has led to a great deal of frustration, and the more frustrated I get, the more I make bad decisions, which just leads to more frustration.
   Playing Seven Card Stud hasn't helped in all this either. Although I knew it would be difficult learning a new game and although I am playing at the absolute lowest level to minimise any losses, my frustration has only increased every time I play this game. I thought that Pot Limit Omaha was a game invented by Satan himself, but it may be that Seven Card Stud is his true favourite. The game seems to be specifically designed to minimise the value of starting hands and to encourage players to draw all the way to seventh street (the seventh and final card). The vast majority of winning hands are made on seventh street and it's ABSOLUTELY DRIVING ME NUTS!
   As a result, I've been increasingly playing on tilt. I go into a SitnGo session with the knowledge that my recent results have been poor and consequentially, I'm desperate to win. Then, when something bad happens I'm thinking 'here we go again' and I start playing recklessly. It all came to a head a few days ago when I played in two SitnGos. In the first I suffered a bad beat to an inferior hand and decided to just push all in pre-flop whenever I got a halfway decent hand. I was thinking, 'come on, call this you jerks!' Of course I got knocked out early. Then in the second game I persisted in betting 3/4 of the pot on bottom pair and a gut-shot (inside) straight draw on every betting round. I simply refused to give credit to the calling player for a decent hand and got beaten out of most of my chips by top pair. Well duh! After that I decided to take a step back and take a couple of deep breaths.
   I took some time to take a look at my records and see if I could find a reason for this loss of form. So far, I've found nothing. I've been playing at the same level, on the same site, and often against the same players for some months. I don't think my play has become predictable, and I don't think I was playing any differently when this decline started. As far as I can tell, I've just hit a rough patch: a run of bad luck.

   So it's time to call a time out. The expert consensus seems to be, when things are running badly, take a break. Trying to play through a rough patch is not generally recommended. So I've decided to give poker-playing a rest for a while. As I came to this decision on May 22nd and the winter solstice is on June 22nd, I thought a month-long break might be appropriate. I've already lasted a whole week without playing any poker, so that's a good start.
   However, I don't think it's possible for me to stop thinking about poker. I'll use the time to read up on SitnGo strategy to see if I can pick up any useful advice. I've already checked out a couple of interesting websites: www.cardschat.com and www.suntzupoker.com . Both these sites recommend a SitnGo strategy that is pretty similar to the one I'm already using. I've also found a book at the local library that might be useful. So I'll take a look at that and spend some time looking through some of the other stuff that I've printed off from time to time but never really taken a good look at. At this stage, I'm planning to make my last poker-less week completely poker-free. No study, no planning, no nothing. I've got a big family event coming up in that week, so that should be suitably distracting.
   Then, come the shortest day, it's back into the fray  refreshed, rested and ready for anything. That's my theory anyway.
  
  

1000 Hours

  Anyway you'll never know the many times I've tried
  And still they lead me back to the long and winding road           The Beatles

   Five years ago the only poker game that I was involved in was an occasional home game among friends, played at my place. This game was played five or six times per year, so I was playing maybe 30 hours of poker per year. By this stage we had already added Texas Holdem to our list of games, having seen it played on TV on ESPN. It was seeing this TV coverage, with its cast of poker professionals,  that really got me thinking about the game and how it was played. So sometime around the end of the year I went down to the local library and borrowed a couple of  "beginners' guides". 
   I don't remember the name of that first poker book (I think it was written by Ken Warren), but it was something of a revelation to me. I came to realise that there were certain basic principals to successful poker play, based on simple mathematical concepts. By applying these principals correctly, you could become a winning player and there were even people who made a living out of playing poker! This book also pointed out the importance of two things: bankroll management and record-keeping. So I set about applying some of the things I'd learned, starting with record-keeping. I got a notebook and started writing down the details of the games I played in, including the type of game, my bankroll balance, the amount won or lost, and the hours played.
   The first game that I recorded was played on Saturday 11th October 2008, at 7.30pm. This was a five-handed home game, dealer's choice, with a betting limit of $1-$5. I went in with $80 and broke even, coming out with the same amount. I played for 5 1/2 hours. There were many games to follow that and when I'd filled up my notebook I graduated to an exercise book and started drawing up tables and recording results for particular game types separately from the overall totals. It all got rather complicated but I could never complain about not having enough information about my games. If anything, I was suffering from information overload.
   There are only two other entries for that year; one more home game and my first ever casino game, played on Christmas eve. In 2009 things changed a bit. The year was book-ended by visits to the casino. I'd got into the habit of playing a few No Limit Texas Holdem cash games at the casino during the Christmas holidays. Meanwhile, the home games continued, and I also played a few other games at a local pool club. By the end of that year I'd played a total of 82 hours since my records started and was ahead by a handful of dollars (no, nowhere near a fistful).
   I played a lot more in 2010. This was the year when I discovered the Friday night Texas Holdem Tournament at the Phoenix Tavern. My regular home game fizzled out in March and was replaced by a regular visit to the Friday night tournament. This game cost $20 to play in ($10 buy-in, $10 re-buy or add-on), and my bankroll started moving into negative territory, $20 at a time. It wasn't until October that I had my first win, by which time I was several hundred dollars in the red. I had enough wins after that to reduce the deficit, and by the last game of the year (Christmas Eve again) I had almost got back into the black. At this stage I'd played 178 hours of poker.
   2011 started out much the same as the previous year, but then I started playing online. My first ever online poker game was on February 8th, playing in a Texas Holdem ring game on Fulltilt Poker. From that point on I was playing at least once per week online, first on Fulltilt, then on 888 Poker. And I was still playing in the live tournament every couple of weeks up until October when they stopped playing. By the end of the year I'd played another 250 hours of poker, taking my total to over 400 hours. Considering I was playing 30 hours annually a few years before, this was a huge increase. Poker was starting to take over my life.
   By March of 2012 I was playing exclusively online and had hit the 500 hours mark. At this point I considered something I had read in that same poker book several years previously. The author had pointed out that poker is not for everyone; that some people just didn't have the knack for it. He suggested that if the reader was still not a winning player by the time they'd played 500 hours, then maybe poker wasn't for them; maybe they should take up macramé, or topiary or something. At this point my results were not very good. Although I was ahead, it was not by much, and my win rate was barely above zero. Not a great result for 500 hours of play. So I did consider giving up and taking up the trombone. Briefly. Very briefly. Actually, I was hooked on poker and was probably never going to give it up. Maybe if I'd used up all my poker reserves and had to start paying back into my bankroll I would have considered it. Maybe.
   Now, fourteen months later, I've just passed the one thousand hours mark. So the first 500 hours took me nearly 3 1/2 years; the second 500 took just over a year. My bankroll has got healthier in that time too. Although my balance dipped into negative territory in the middle of last year (see 'Mid-Winter Nosedive'), it recovered around the beginning of this year and has been more or less climbing ever since. In fact my poker stake hit an all-time high in the middle of April, although it's dropped back a bit since then. Since I started concentrating on SitnGos things have been looking up. But it's still very much a learning curve, and every game presents a new challenge. That's the great thing about this game; after 1000 hours of play there is plenty still to learn.
   Now that I've reached this milestone, I can look forward to the next one: 2000 hours?  5000 hours?  Actually, I've set myself some more modest goals, some things that should be achievable in the short to medium term. These include:
   *Moving up to the next level in 7 Card Stud (if I can manage a few wins at the current level)
   *Moving up a level in SitnGos (I just have to get out of my current flat patch)
   *Making a withdrawal from the 888 poker site
   *Playing multiple online games
   *Getting back into a live game (got to get my bankroll up a little higher first).
 And of course there's always the goal of increasing my poker stake. Maybe the next milestone I should be aiming for is a $1000 bankroll...
    I'll keep you posted.